Exploring innovation in the context of employee relationship and it-enabled knowledge sharing

Abstract

Innovation is one of the critical success factors for organizations. It is essential for business to understand the driving factors of innovation. This study investigates impacts of the following two aspects on innovation: employee relationship and knowledge sharing. 167 samples of firm level data were collected to construct the measurements of innovation, intensity of employee relationship, employee diversity, quality of knowledge sharing, and IT application maturity. It is found that all of these factors have significant impacts on innovation. Furthermore, IT application maturity has a significant moderating effect of enabling knowledge sharing to improve innovation. In order to further refine the characteristics of employee relationship, an individual level study was conducted to construct three consolidated employee social networks. It is shown that centrality of the information social network, which can be perceived as relationship characteristics of an individual employee in the network, is positively related to performance. With analysis at both organizational and individual level, this study empirically illustrates the importance of exploring innovation in the context of employee relationship and IT-enabled knowledge sharing. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.